Receiver Operating Characteristic

Synonyms

Operating characteristic; Relative operating characteristic; ROC

Definition

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis is a graphical approach for analyzing the performance of a classifier. It uses a pair of statistics – true positive rate and false positive rate – to characterize a classifier’s performance. The statistics are plotted on a two-dimensional graph, with false positive rate on the x-axis and true positive rate on the y-axis. The resulting plot can be used to compare the relative performance of different classifiers and to determine whether a classifier performs better than random guessing.

Historical Background

ROC analysis was originally developed in signal detection theory to deal with the problem of discriminating known signals from a random noise background [11]. It was first applied to the radar detection problem to quantify how effective targets such as enemy aircrafts can be identified according to their radar signatures. In the 1960s, ROC analysis...